For those of you that don’t know the meta keyword tag looks like here is an example:

<META name”keywords” content=”german shepherd dog, gsd dog, german shepherd dog breed,”>

The keywords that are being targeted start at ‘german shepherd dog’.

Click play to watch the video, it is very short but covers everything you need to know about the meta keyword tag.

Matt makes it very clear that Google give absolutely no weight to the meta keyword tag due to how it was abused in the past. What Matt has shared has been common knowledge in the SEO world for a long time. If you are with a company that is still using the keyword tag for the ‘benefit’ of Google then maybe you need to start looking elsewhere.

Should you use meta keywords?

Yes, because other search engines may still give them some weight. My recommendation is that you only use a few relevant keywords per page that you create on your website.

If you have a page on your website about, let’s say, the German Shepherd dog, you could use the following:

German Shepherd dog, GSD, Alsation, German Shepherd dog breed.

That is pretty much the level of the keywords I would use in the meta keyword tag. The keywords are all relevant to the page and I haven’t gone overboard and added loads of keywords.

I wouldn’t lose any sleep over the meta keyword tag and simply choose the best fit for the page content and you’ll be fine.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. Be sure to read Matt’s post about the meta keyword tag.

301 Permanent Redirection Frustration

Yesterday I was speaking with a friend about their website and she told me something that got me annoyed. What she told me was that she had contacted her website hosting company to ask them to apply a permanent redirection to her website. I’ll get to my rant in a minute but before I do, let me explain what a permanent redirect is and why you should have one.

Google and the other search engines may view www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com as two different websites, known as URL canonicalization. A 301 redirect tells the search engines that a page has moved permanently (a 302 is a temporary redirect).

A post by Matt Cutts Explains URL Canonicalization and 301 Redirections in greater detail here.

The main point here is what I have quoted below:

Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

www.example.com
example.com/
www.example.com/index.html
example.com/home.asp

But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

So, with this point in hand, I recommend that you forward yourdomain.com to www.yourdomain.com as this is what the majority of Internet users are already familiar with. You should also apply a 301 to any URL that points to the same homepage.

With a 301 redirect in place you are avoiding the spread of authority and your inbound link credit being shared across two websites.

For any URLs beyond your top level domain, example, www.yourdomain.com/page1 you can manually apply a 301 permanent redirect yourself (if your hosting account has this feature) if you change the URL to something different; www.yourdomain.com/page1 to www.yourdomain.com/page-1. Any visitor coming to your page from the old link will be redirect to your new URL without triggering a 404 page not found error message.

However, if you apply this for your homepage you will trigger a permanent loop, meaning that your website will NEVER load (it is redirecting one URL to another and back again making the redirect infinite).

Now, back to my rant. When my friend contacted her hosting account to ask for a permanent redirect to be applied to her site, redirecting the non www URL to the www URL, she was told that they would have to charge her for this. Seriously!

I host the majority of my sites with Host Monster and it takes me five minutes to log-in, get on the instant chat (they use a live chat agent to provide customer support), ask for a redirect to applied to a site and a minute or so later they say ‘it’s been done for you, is there anything else we can help you with?’.

Please, do not pay for a permanent redirect, if your hosting account says that you have to pay for this then I recommend you start looking for somewhere better to host your website. If they are going to charge you for this what else will they charge you for? My friend has already set up her account with Host Monster and is now getting the level of support that she requires and deserves, after all, she is a paying customer. Rant over…

To your success,

Karl Foxley

You can read an article that goes deeper into server side redirects and how to do them; you can read it here.

Best of the Web A Leading Directory

BOTW, or Best of the Web, is still one of the best directories on the Internet. If you think directory submissions is dead then think again!

The assumption that Google treats ‘paid for‘ directory submissions as a paid for link is very much mistaken and this was discussed by Matt Cutts in a recent video. I’ve shared the video before but just in case you missed it, here it is again.

Your take-away from this video is that not all directories are created equal, some are just there to make money from as many people as possible! You need to assess the quality of the directory before you ever pay for a link.

So, does Best of the Web provide a quality link? Absolutely!

BOTW has a Google Page Rank of 6, so the Goog see the directory as an authority site.

Are all links approved? No!

Bad quality websites are not approved.

So, if you are still looking for a top quality link, you can now rest easy that getting listed on BOTW is NOT the same as ‘buying links’ as Matt Cutts has made clear.

Go get your top quality link right here.

Get A Quality Link Today at BOTW

The most important thing you can do is make sure you select the most appropriate category for your website (remember, relevancy is key).

If your website crosses a range of categories then I recommend you choose the one that is most important to you.

To recap, a paid link in a poor quality directory that approves all links is probably going to do more harm than good, BOTW on the other hand is a great place to start with you link building strategy.

To your success,

Karl Foxley

P.s. If you are interested in local search, BOTW have now added a special feature for just for you. Just click on the link towards the bottom of the home page that says ‘local search’. Here is the link again.

Seems pretty clear to me!

To your success,

Karl Foxley

Let Matt Cutts explain this further by watching the video below.

So as you can see, some links are going to be much more effective than others.

Here are some directories that you should be on.

DMOZ.org (free)

BOTW (paid)

Yahoo Directory (paid)

To your success,

Karl Foxley